Legal scholar Beth Bilson was a ‘legend’ to generations of women in law

Beth Bilson, a leading academic scholar on labour and administrative law, the first woman to be appointed dean at the University of Saskatchewan’s law school and chair of an influential federal task force on pay equity, has died at age 79.

“Beth was the epitome of an excellent academic lawyer,” said Thomas Cromwell, a retired Supreme Court of Canada justice who worked closely with Ms. Bilson when she was editor of the Canadian Bar Review and he chaired the publication’s editorial board. The two first got to know each other as legal academics in the 1980s, when Mr. Cromwell taught law at Dalhousie University and Ms. Bilson was at the University of Saskatchewan.